Global Warming has Won

I had my first hands-on experience with a computer in 1966.   That's when I wrote my first computer program.  About a decade later I made the then bold prediction that "computers will take over the world".  And about a decade after that I opined that "They won.   Computers have succeeded in taking over the world".  Did I mean that some kind of Skynet AI would be running everything and people would merely be appendages.   No!  My definition of "taking over" was much more modest.

What I meant was that computers would be so deeply imbedded into society in ways so pivotal and important that society could no longer function without them.   At that time a case could perhaps be made that my pronouncement was a bit premature.

But people now organizing all aspects of their lives using a smartphone, a powerful computer wrapped in an attractive package.  And much else in our lives now depends on cheap, powerful, and ubiquitous computing happening behind the scenes.  So, all doubt as to the truth of my pronouncement is long gone.

In a parallel vein, experts have now been worrying about Global Warming taking over for several decades.  As with computers, for a long time it was some sort of vague concern about the future.  Bad things were definitely going to start to happen at some point.  It is my contention that we have now reached that "some point".  The future is now.  And that means that Global Warming has, in fact, won.

There is a case to be made that I am premature in making this pronouncement.  In fact, the case is stronger for my Global Warming pronouncement being premature than it was with respect to my pronouncement about computers taking over.  Nevertheless, I think I got my computer call right back then.  And I think I am right in making my Global Warming pronouncement now rather than later.

Back then scientists and other experts were little concerned about whether or not computers were or were not taking over.  As a result, they spent little time considering the question and even less time debating a time line.  The same can not be said about Global Warming.  Scientists have been very concerned about the issue from the start.

And they have spent a lot of time and effort trying to estimate when various milestones would take place.  And the consensus position from the start has been that critical milestones will be reached "soon but not yet".  Since that initial estimate, when we will hit "soon" is has continued to shrink.  "Soon" is now about a decade.

Bill Gates recently published a book on the subject of Global Warming.  He does a nice job of laying out the consensus position on how big the problem is.  I reviewed the book favorably in a blog post.  (See:  Sigma 5: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.)  In the book Gates lays out a timeline for what needs to be done and when.  If the timeline is followed than Gates opines that a climate disaster will be avoided.

If the Gates plan is followed then all will be well by 2050.  In my review I opined that we would be lucky to have everything he lays out implemented by 2100.  And Gates tells us that there are things that we need to be doing right now.  But we aren't doing them.  Worse yet, I don't see any reason to believe that we will start doing them any time soon.

My thinking has tended to track that of scientists and experts, people like Gates.  But I have now changed my mind.  I did so abruptly.  It was as a result of reading the June 8, 2021 edition of the Seattle Times.

It contained a number of disturbing stories, all pointing in the same direction.  The stories concerned events that took place far from my home town.  So the Seattle Times was not the originator but merely the purveyor of this information.  And the information was truly scary.

One story concerned specific instances of prolonged periods of bad weather happening in specific places.  The events described were very scary.  But what made it even more scary was that they fit into a pattern that has been becoming more and more pronounced.  Let's start with the events described in the story.

The story reported on recent extremely high daytime temperatures in the parts of Middle East and in Central Asia.  These temperatures often exceeded 125 degrees Fahrenheit.  That's considered dangerously hot even for traditionally hot and dry places.  The Middle East is known for being hot.  But there's hot and there's HOT.

There have always been places where it gets extremely hot.  But places known for their extreme heat were desolate places where nobody lives.  Death Valley is an example.  No one lives there.  People don't live in extremely hot places like Death Valley because people can't survive prolonged stays in extremely hot places.

These temperatures were recorded in populated areas, areas known for their heat but not for their extreme heat.  But the places in the story that are seeing record breaking temperatures are places that host medium to large populations.  Not an oasis but a city or a metropolis.  The fact that such large populations have been living there for a long time indicates that they didn't used to feature such extreme temperatures.

One thing I learned from the story is that there is something called the 50 degree club.  50 degrees Celsius equates to 122 degrees Fahrenheit.  Most countries never manage a high enough temperature to qualify for membership in the 50 degree club.  Five Middle East countries joined the club in the past few days.  And in several of them, it wasn't even close.

A few days ago a town in Abu Dhabi hit 51 Celsius (123.8 Fahrenheit).  A town in Kuwait hit 50.9 (123.6).  A town on an island in Oman, where surrounding water should have moderated things, hit 50.1 (122.2).  So did a small town in Pakistan, a country that isn't even in the Middle East.  It's in Central Asia, normally a hot but not super-hot region.  A day later a town in the UAE hit 51.7 (125.2).  But wait, there's more.

As the altitude goes up the temperature goes down.  That means cities situated at altitude are cooler, usually much cooler, than otherwise similar cities located near sea level.  In spite of this, a town in Iran managed to hit 45.5 (113.9).  Not super-hot until you learn that this town is situated at an altitude of over 3,000 feet.  A town at altitude in Turkmenistan hit 44.7 (116).  A town at altitude in Uzbekistan hit 44.4 (112.5).  A balloon launched in Abu Dhabi had to ascend to 5,000 feet before the temperature dropped below 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

These parts of the world are known for being hot.  But this is extreme heat.  Temperatures are running about 15 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.  That's a lot.  Closer to home, over the last few days we have seen temperatures ten or more degrees above normal in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota.  Very high temperatures in late July or early August?  That would be expected.  Extremely high temperatures in early June and in multiple different parts of the world?  Something is going on.

If this was all that has been going on I would not be that worried.  But there's also this.

The most talked about driver of Global Warming is Carbon Dioxide.  The "Greenhouse Effect" that makes Carbon Dioxide important was well understood two hundred years ago.  With that in mind, C. David Keeling of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography set out to try to understand what was normal when it came to the level of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere.

The proper way to do this is to take a whole lot of measurements.  You want to measure it in a lot of places.  And you want to keep measuring it over and over so that you can see how it changes over time.  But at the time (1958) measurements of that kind were hard to do.  If he was going to be able to do it at all he was going to have to figure out the minimum he could do that would be informative.

He decided that taking the measurement in just one place, if you picked the right place, would have to do.  He looked around and decided an astronomical observatory on Mauna Loa mountain in Hawaii was it.  There he could measure pure ocean air far from industry or big cities.

And while taking measurements in one place might do, he had to repeat the measurement on a strict schedule.  He could manage a twice per day measurement, so that's what he did.  Those twice per day measurements from the Mauna Loa observatory continue to this day.  Others have started similar programs at various locations scattered around the world.  And we now have satellites gathering additional data.

Why did he do it?  It was not because he knew what he would find.  It was because no one knew what he would find.  No one had ever tried to do it before.  And there were literally no well established theories capable of predicting what the measurements would show.  It only took him a couple of years to learn something interesting.

The level of Carbon Dioxide varies with the season.  It is always high at the same time of year (May) and always low at the same time of year (roughly six months later).  It didn't take long to figure out that the pattern correlated with industrial activity in the Northern hemisphere.  The correlation was obvious in retrospect.  But, absent any data, other correlations were plausible.

It took longer for another pattern to emerge.  The highs kept getting higher.  The lows kept getting higher too.  That was surprising.  Scientists knew that industrial activity threw Carbon Dioxide into the air.  But they also knew that plants pulled it out of the air and turned it into plant matter.  It was entirely possible that the two process would balance each other and the average amount of Carbon Dioxide would stay roughly the same.

Initially this was an interesting but not concerning development.  Maybe there was a process that played out over a longer time period.  Sun spots, for instance, follow an 11 year cycle.  Maybe there was something like that going on.

But year after year the trend was up, always up.  Various possible mechanisms that would drive levels back down were shown to either not exist or to not be powerful enough to overcome whatever was pushing the levels up.

As the "upward, ever upward" pattern got more pronounced scientists started to worry.  It became more and more important to try to get a much more detailed understanding of what was going on.  So they delved into every possible mechanism for increasing or decreasing the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere.

They learned a lot.  A big volcanic eruption throws a lot of Carbon Dioxide into the air.  Various geological processes pull Carbon Dioxide out of the air.  But eruptions cause a spike that only lasts a year or so.  And geologic activity takes thousands of years to make a difference.  As the details got filled in and understanding deepened concern increased.  The result was the IPCC.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1984 by the World Meteorological Organization, an agency of the U.N.  Its job was to consolidate and organize all the scattered efforts to understand climate and climate change.  Thousands of scientists contribute.  The IPCC periodically issues a report summarizing the current state of the art.

Five "assessments" have been issued.  The next one is due next year.  The IPCC itself does no research.  It collects, evaluates, collates, and consolidates the research of others.  Every report includes questions that need more work to answer and areas that are poorly understood.  But with each report the level of understanding keeps improving.

Old questions keep getting replaced by new ones as the understanding deepens.  The new the questions tend to be more focused.  A general understanding leads to questions relating to one or another specific area that is still not well understood.  An understanding of larger effects leads to questions about smaller effects.

The picture keeps getting clearer and more detailed.  But the improved clarity and detail leaves the overall situation unchanged.  The environment is warming up.  It is warming at an increasing rate.  This warming is causing greater and greater disruptions.  More contentious, but only outside scientific circles, is that the evidence that the largest driver of this warming trend is man made activity.

That last conclusion gores many oxen.  And many of these oxen are wealthy and powerful.  They stand to lose a lot if large mitigation measures are undertaken.  They have been pushing back, hard, since before the first IPCC report was issued in 1990.  Since the science and the data are solid they tend to depend heavily on FUD:  Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

With that background in place, let me turn to the other story that caught my eye in the newspaper that day.  It reported on record high levels of Carbon Dioxide being found in the latest measurements.  Given the upward trend that has now been on display for more than 60 years, that would normally be seen as disappointing but not surprising.  But context is everything.

We are just now emerging from the economic disruption caused by COVID-19.  For more than a year people have stayed home.  They also bought less, drove less, flew less.  As a result, business dried up.  Manufacturers cut production back drastically.  Shipping goods became much more difficult, especially if a border crossing was involved.  The usual cast of characters responsible for Carbon Dioxide emissions all took big hits.

As a result, Carbon Dioxide emissions fell by 5.8% in 2020.  That should have resulted on good news on the Global Warming front.  But Carbon Dioxide hit 419 PPM in May of 2021.   That's a new record.  It's only 2 PPM higher than it was a year ago.  But, given  how much COVID decreased economic activity one would think it would have gone down significantly.  The news gets worse.

The currently agreed upon target of Global Warming mitigation plans is a 7.6% reduction every year from 2020 to 2030.  If achieved, this is supposed to cause the global temperature to increase by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) or less.  Swinging a COVID wrecking ball at the economy only caused emissions to decrease by 5.8%.  And the decrease was so transient that Carbon Dioxide actually increased from May of 2020 to May of 2021.

This is the clearest evidence possible of just how hard it will be to stop, or even substantially slow the rate of increase of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere.  Couple this with the fact that there is still little will, political or otherwise, to implement the draconian measures that would be necessary.  It's just not going to happen.

That means that the "how bad is it right now" question is critically important.  I noted a story from one newspaper that was published about a week ago.  I ended up putting the writing of this post on hold for several days.  During that period story after story after story of extreme bad weather hit the news.  Bad weather events are getting almost as common as mass shooting events.  Each type of event has now become so common that only the worst events even make the news now.

It has gotten to the point that only those who go out of their way to deny or avoid the increasingly obvious signs can remain Climate Deniers.  Mother Nature is literally rubbing our faces in Global Warming on a daily basis now.  If it's not droughts, its wild fires and dust storms.  Or it is the flip side, torrential rains, floods, and the like.  The weather has changed to the point where places that were hospitable to occupation are no longer livable.

Right now, only a few places have seen conditions change to that extent.  But you would have been hard pressed to find any such places even as little as ten years ago.  Things are still manageable.  But only if things don't continue to get worse.  But getting worse is already baked into the cake.

One of the things we have learned since the first IPCC report is just how critical the oceans are.  When scientists first started studying the life cycle of Carbon Dioxide they quickly discovered how little they knew.  They could roughly estimate how much Carbon Dioxide human activity was throwing into the air.  And they had a reasonable idea of where about half of it ended up.  But where the other half went was then a complete mystery.

They now know that the missing half goes into the ocean.  And it turns the ocean acidic.  The ocean is ginormous.  But there is enough Carbon Dioxide involved that the effect is easy to measure.  And the effect is bad.  Lots of sea creatures depend on shells or bones or other hard substances.  Acidic water damages those hard substances and makes them harder to create in the first place.

The negative impact this increased level of acidity has already been enough to be noticeable.  It's bad now but not yet really bad.  Something that is already much worse is heat.  The surface of the earth is already noticeably warmer.  And that has translated into the surface of the ocean getting noticeably warmer.

The most spectacular result of this is more strong (category 4 and category 5) hurricanes.  The magic number is 22 degrees Celsius.  If the water a hurricane is traveling over is 22 degrees or warmer the hurricane quickly increases in intensity.  We now see hurricanes going from category 2 to category 4 in less than 24 hours.  No one thought that was even possible a decade ago.  Now meteorologists have seen it happen several times.

The ocean is full of currents.  They cause surface water to "downwell" into deeper parts of the ocean and deep water to "upwell" to the surface.  It turns out that corals are very sensitive to temperature.  Downwelling warm water has heated the water that surrounds coral reefs.  That has caused "bleaching" events around the world.  A coral's colors come from tiny creatures that live on the surface of the coral skeleton.  Warm water causes these creatures to flee leaving the white skeleton material behind.

It turns out that there is an effect that is even more perverse than coral bleaching.  Ocean water circulates.  It downwells here.  It upwells there.  Over time the temperature of the surface water gets propagated to deeper and deeper parts of the ocean.  Until recently all the upwelling water was old, cold water.  That tended to keep the earth's surface cooler.  But not anymore.

Global arming has been going on long enough that the upwelling water is now warmer than it used to be.  And that means that the oceans no longer cool the surface as much as they used to.  There is a general term for what is going on here.  It's called inertia.

Lots of additional warming is baked in by this inertia.  It will happen even if we wave a magic wand and cause the level of Carbon Dioxide in the air to instantaneously drop all the way back to per-industrial levels and stay there.

In terms of the weather, we are living our best life right now.  All those storms, all those droughts and floods, all those high temperature records.  They constitute our best life.  Going forward, it's going to keep getting worse no matter what we do.

No one has done the computation or modeling to estimate how much worse will it get if we fix things immediately.  But there is no doubt that things will get considerably worse.  And it will keep getting worse for 40-200 years.  That's how long it would take for the bad things that are already built in but haven't happened yet to work themselves out.

But there is no magic wand.  We are not going to immediately return Carbon Dioxide levels to per-industrial levels.  There are powerful and well established groups that know how to fight most of the activities Gates outlined in his book.  The political will to oppose these powerful groups is building.  But they are only powerful enough to win a skirmish here and a skirmish there.

A court ordered Royal Dutch Shell to drastically reduce greenhouse emissions.  Exxon-Mobil, the giant oil company, now has three "green" people on its board.  But the Shell court case might get overturned or cut back drastically by an appellate court.  And the Exxon-Mobil board members are far from a majority.

There are rays of hope to be found here and there.  But these are candles of hope when what we need are search lights.  Substantial progress is years away.  And that means we need to shift our focus.  Most current effort is focused on avoidance.  Gates book tells us how to avoid a climate catastrophe.  It tells us little about how to live with one.

It is time to shift our attention to mitigation.  If it is possible, we should do both.  But the Global Warming catastrophe has only been slowed by most of our efforts being devoted to avoidance.  Fortunately, mother nature is weighing in more and more loudly and clearly each day.

Ten years ago it was relatively easy to avoid noticing any of the effects of Global Warming.  That strategy is now on the ropes.  Mother Nature is already making the case that Global Warming is real, and that it is bad.  As time goes by that case will only get stronger and harder to ignore.  The need for people to articulate the case will diminish.  But Mother Nature lacks the ability to provide direction on the subject of mitigation.

I, however, have posted on the subject of mitigation before.  I did it all the way back in 2018.  Here's the link:  Sigma 5: Global Warming.  Mitigation is possible.  That's good because we have no choice.  We are going to be forced to find a way to learn to live with the effects of Global Warming.  After all, Global Warming has won.

Capitol Punishment

I promise my next post will be on a happier topic.

This subject has been in the news recently.  The stand out "star" of a lot of this coverage has been the state of Oklahoma.  They were in the news a few months ago because they managed to horribly botch an execution.  They are currently in the news because a case has come before the Supreme Court about their current method of execution and because they have introduced a new method of performing Capitol Punishment:  Nitrogen Asphyxiation.  I'll get to where I stand on Capitol Punishment later.  But first comes the historical tour.  As always, it provides context for what follows.

People, and the governments they have created, have been executing people as far back as we can go.  Execution is the process of killing someone with deliberate intent.  It happens outside of war and is supposed to take place outside the heat of passion.  But states (the generic term for government at any level) have been deciding for one reason or another that one specific person or another needs to die for as long as states have been around.

The most well known historical example is the decision of the Romans to execute Jesus using the "crucifixion" method.  Jesus was not the first person the Romans executed and Rome was not the first state to execute someone.  But it unambiguously establishes for even the most history averse that the practice is more than 2,000 years old.

And the case of Jesus illustrates something else.  The methods change over time and across cultures.  Crucifixion has, to put it mildly, gone out of favor.  There are two methods that have been in use broadly for thousands of years.  One is hanging and the other is beheading.   I am going to discuss hanging first.

We are all familiar with the general technique from hundreds of movies.  A "hangman's noose" is fashioned out of one end of a piece of rope.  The noose is put around the victim's neck and a drop is arranged.  In westerns the drop typically involves a tree and a horse.  In the more bureaucratic situation the victim is stationed over a trap door on a raised platform.  In any case the rope is tied down in such a way that there is some slack.  When the horse is startled or the trap drops the victim falls through a distance whereupon the noose brings him up short.  At that point the noose is supposed to kill him.

It turns out the "kill him" part is trickier than you would think.  My state used to hang people until very recently.  There was a court case a few years ago involving whether or not a specific hanging was likely to go off correctly. The details don't matter.  But a side effect was that a tutorial on hanging appearing in the local paper.  As a result I know far more than I should have to know about the mechanics of the process.  And now you will too.

The first thing to know is that the Westerns get it wrong.  The knot itself is fine.  But the knot needs to be placed at the side of the head.  In most Westerns it is at the back.  What is supposed to happen is that the prisoner's neck gets snapped and the prisoner dies essentially instantaneously.  What could possibly go wrong?  Basically, two things.

The first I have already hinted at.  The neck might not get snapped.  This can happen if the noose is in the wrong position or if the drop distance is too short.  In this situation the prisoner strangles to death.  This may take twenty minutes or longer.  That's not  instantaneous.  What it is is "cruel and unusual punishment".  The second way things can go badly wrong is if the drop distance is too long.  In this case the head can literally be separated from the rest of the body.  Death is quick but it is also messy.

There was supposed to be a secret manual for how to do a proper hanging that state prison officials had access to.  It was supposed to have all the formulas and calculations for getting the drop distance "just right".  But eventually my state decided to abandon hanging in favor of other methods.

The second historical method is one that more obviously evolved out of warfare.  In battle one way to kill your enemy is to cut his head of with a sword.  That's hard to do and from a military perspective seriously wounding the opposing soldier may be as effective or even more so.  So soldiers didn't worry overmuch if they got it exactly right every time.  But executioners did.  So over time the sword got replaced by the headsman's axe.  The idea was the same.  Off with his head.  But the idea was to improve the chances of that happening "first time, every time".  So a special axe was developed.  The idea was that if you put it in the hands of a big strong guy and gave him a chance to practice then everything would go the way it was supposed to.

But sometimes it didn't.  And that resulted in the first "scientific" attempt to improve things.   The Guillotine was invented in France in about 1789.  The device consisted of a heavy blade in a slot.  The prisoner was secured so that, when dropped, the blade would cut his head off at the neck.  It was easy to design such a device that worked very reliably.  Any kinks were rapidly fixed and a standardized design quickly came into universal use.  And, in contrast to the headsman and his  axe, there was pretty much nothing that could go wrong.  The Guillotine was simple, cheap, reliable, and extremely effective.  So why has it fallen out of use?

The Guillotine is intimately bound up in peoples' consciousness with the French Revolution.  During this event large numbers of people were executed with it.  It worked so well that pretty much any group could put one up and start executing people.  And in far too many cases they did.  There is a phase of the French Revolution rightly called "The Terror".  And the French Revolution brought us Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars.  So people outside France are not fans of the French Revolution.  And many people inside France share this sentiment.  And then there is another thing.

A lot of policy in modern society is driven by the "yuck factor".  It doesn't matter how much sense something might otherwise make, if people think it is yucky they will often opt for a less sensible but also less obviously yucky alternative.  And that's what happened to the Guillotine.  It was associated with the French Revolution.  Yuck!  But there was also the fact that what the Guillotine does is behead someone.  Someone's head ends up falling into a basket and there is blood all over the place.  People find that yucky.  They search for alternatives.

This "yuck" factor also applies to another method of execution, the firing squad. Firing squads date back to before the invention of the Guillotine.  They too are reasonably cheap, simple to pull off, reliable, and effective.  A gun is a highly reliable and simple to operate killing machine.   Ammunition in the quantities necessary to perform an execution is cheap and hitting what you aim at from a short distance away does not require any skill.  But people find other people shooting people at short range with the intent of killing them to be yucky.  So the firing squad has mostly fallen out of favor.

And that brings us to one of the most bizarre pieces of history on this subject that I know of.  In the late 1800's the great, and by this time beloved, inventor Thomas Alva Edison was locked in a titanic corporate struggle over the future of the electrical industry.  Edison was a "DC" man.  His opponents were "AC" men.  The AC side eventually won for very sound technical reasons I am not going to go into.  But Edison understood the power of public relations.  And he set about to use this understanding against his opponents.  He chose as his vehicle, executions.  Edison was directly responsible for the invention of the Electric Chair.

By then it was known that subjecting people to large amounts of electricity could kill or maim them.  Edison's idea was to associate AC electricity with horrible botched executions.  So behind the scenes he arranged for a PR campaign to get the Electric Chair adopted as the preferred and "scientific" method of execution.  He succeeded.  He succeeded in getting Electric Chairs broadly adopted.  He succeeded in getting them to use AC electricity.  He succeeded in getting the fact that Electric Chairs used AC electricity broadly known while keeping his behind the scenes manipulations a secret.  He succeeded in causing a lot of botched executions to take place.  Where he failed was in the war to defeat AC power.  But after the battle was over states kept using Electric Chairs anyhow and they kept presiding over botched executions.

The next step in this peculiar dance from method to method is the Gas Chamber.  As anyone who indulges in Murder Mysteries knows, Cyanide is a poison.  It is easy to turn an innocuous looking and reasonable safe chemical solid called Potassium Cyanide into a chemical gas called Hydrogen Cyanide.  Breathing Hydrogen Cyanide will kill you.  A Gas Chamber is a sealed room.  The prisoner is strapped into a chair in the room.  The room is then sealed up.  Then a mechanism is activated that turns Potassium Cyanide into Hydrogen Cyanide.  Shortly thereafter the prisoner is dead.  The yuck factor is minor because there is no blood and no severed body parts.  But in at least some cases the prisoner, who could be observed through a window in the side of the chamber, appeared to take a long time to die and to be in a great deal of pain.  That sounds cruel.

It should be possible to find a method of execution that is not cruel, is not yucky, and is effective.  The obvious choice was pioneered by, who else, Oklahoma.  It goes by the name of "lethal injection".  The original Oklahoma plan was to inject three drugs, one after the other.  The first drug was an anesthetic.  It put the prisoner to sleep just like in an operating room.  The second drug was a paralytic.  It was supposed to paralyze the prisoner so he didn't move.  The idea was to eliminate any possibility of anything yucky happening other than the death itself.  And, since the prisoner was now thoroughly anesthetized, he would no longer be able to feel pain.  Finally, the drug that would actually kill him was injected.

On paper this all sounded perfect.  If everything went as planned, the procedure would have most of the positive attributes of the Guillotine.  It was simple, reliable, and effective.  It was not as cheap as a Guillotine but by this time death penalty cases had become quite expensive.  So in that context it was reasonably inexpensive.  And it was carefully designed to avoid the all important yuck factor.  What could possibly go wrong?

And that is somewhat of a mystery to me.  Veterinarians routinely euthanize family pets.  It is important that the pet be treated respectfully and that the procedure be quick, reliable, and apparently painless.  If vets can do this on a daily basis in offices all around the country why can't prison officials do the same?  I have no good answer to this, only a bad one.  The problem is just not that hard to solve.  I would have talked to a bunch of vets to see how they did it.  And I would have duplicated their procedure.  But Oklahoma didn't do that.  Instead they asked Jay Chapman, at the time the Chief Medical Examiner, to come up with what soon became nicknamed the Chapman Protocol.  It is the three drug method I outlined above.

If the right drugs are used it should work just fine.  And Chapman recommended three specific drugs.  And he went with what he knew, drugs intended for use on people by doctors.  That turned out to be a problem.  The drug makers decided that having their drugs used in executions was too yucky so they stopped that from happening.  And so the formula was switched up.  And drugs from sketchy sources were used.  And, cutting to the chase, we ended up with horribly botched executions in Oklahoma and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere.

There is now a game of "hide and seek" going on.  States that want to continue to use lethal injection are seeking drugs to use.  Drug makers, as a result of the yuck factor, are hiding their drugs from  the state officials in charge of executions by denying them the right to buy them.  Oklahoma's latest idea is to bypass the whole "hide and seek" process entirely.  This seems obvious to me.  There are lots of things out there that, in the right circumstances, kill people.  Many of them are not any kind of drug.  They can be bought on the open market without any kind of license or tracking.  And that's where Oklahoma is trying to go.

The key ingredient in the new system we are told is Nitrogen.  Our air is about 80% Nitrogen and Nitrogen is available inexpensively as an industrial commodity.  You can buy a trainload of it, if you want.  Buying smaller quantities is as easy as going to your local industrial supply house and plunking down your money.  What you get is a high pressure cylinder with enough Nitrogen in it to perform several executions.  It's like getting the bottle on your Gas Barbeque filled and costs roughly the same.

The basic idea is simple.  If you move from an 80% Nitrogen and 20% Oxygen atmosphere (normal air) to a 100% Nitrogen and 0% Oxygen atmosphere the prisoner will die.  Again, what could possibly go wrong?  As is the usual case, the devil is in the details.  I included the term "asphyxiation" in the title for this method on purpose.  That's what it is.  The legislator who proposed the method talked about scuba divers having problems as the genesis of his idea.  For another take, check out the movie "Apollo 13".  One of many problems the "Apollo 13" astronauts had to deal with was running out of Oxygen and that's the key idea in this method.  You run the prisoner out of Oxygen.

But there is a possible problem.  The human body has a lot of backup systems in place to avoid death.  Several of them kick in when it detects that the Oxygen level in the bloodstream of the body is getting low.  If the new Oklahoma method involves simply changing up the mixture from 80/20 to 100/0 then the body will figure out something is wrong and start putting up a fight.  This is essentially what happened in the botched Oklahoma execution.  So the simple "remix" solution will not be an improvement over current methods.

Theoretically there is a simple solution.  If you follow the action in "Apollo 13" you will find out that there was a problem that was going to hit well before the Oxygen gave out.  That was Carbon Dioxide (CO2) poisoning.  Air has a small amount of CO2 in it.  The body can handle that.  But if the percentage gets too high the body can't take it.  So one idea would be to leave the Nitrogen component alone and just substitute CO2 for the Oxygen.  This would eventually kill the prisoner.  The problem is that elevated levels of CO2 are not symptom free.  While they do not include acute pain they are not pleasant.  So we are back in yuck land.

There are other options besides CO2.  But we are now into the same place we were before.  There should be easy solutions to this problem as there should have been with the Chapman Protocol.  But in the case of the Chapman Protocol the officials in Oklahoma managed to bungle it.  Both procedures seem to me to be easy to get right.  So if they can bungle one easy procedure they should be able to bungle another.  The fact that the press reports do not mention any third gas when talking about the new procedure is troubling.  It lends credence to my theory that Oklahoma is going to find a way to bungle this new procedure too.

So what's my opinion of the death penalty?  I don't have a strong one.  The thing that puts me mildly into the "pro" category is Ted Bundy.  He was one of the early serial killers of the TV news era and a local boy.  He was an innocuous looking white guy.  That was one reason he was able to go unsuspected for so long.  No one remembered him.  And those that did could not picture him as the kind of guy who could do the truly scary things he actually did.  He didn't seem the type.  But he was.  The authorities finally caught on to him and caught up with him.  Finally, except that it was not, he was arrested in Utah.  He was tried and convicted.  Then he escaped.  He was caught a second time in Florida.  After a series of "only in Florida" events he was convicted and eventually executed.  Neither Utah nor Florida have a reputation for being soft on serial killers.  But both of them had trouble dealing with Bundy.  He's just one of those people the criminal justice system has trouble dealing with.

So Ted Bundy causes me to lean slightly toward a "pro" position on the death penalty.  But I don't think it would be an awful thing if it was abolished.  And the "anti" people have two good arguments.  First, it is used frivolously.  Ted Bundy types are exceedingly rare.  So the death penalty should be used only infrequently and only for special cases.  Texas and some other states substantially over use it.  The second argument is even more serious.  A lot of people who have been executed were innocent.  And a lot of people on death row have been proved innocent.  If you want details, check into The Innocence Project.  The state  should not kill innocent people.  Period.  And unfortunately, the states that seem to like to execute the people the most are the states with the poorest criminal justice systems.  And those criminal justice systems routinely convict the wrong people.

Finally, let me back up and apply some context here.  The state kills a lot of people every year and a very small percentage of these killings are death penalty executions.  Instead the vast majority of them are cases where some law enforcement official shoots and kills some civilian.  We have been barraged by video of these incidents recently.  You can argue the merits of this or that case.  But it is obvious that a lot of people are getting killed and that a lot of those people should not have been killed.

Is there a real and important difference between a cop shooting and killing someone on the street and a death penalty execution?  And make no mistake about it.  Both forms of killing are state sponsored.  The state gives cops the legal right to use deadly force.  In terms of the effect the answer is no.  So this is a case of worrying about a small slice of a larger group and, for the most part, ignoring the much larger slice.  Worrying about a few people getting executed at the end of a long drawn out criminal justice process while not paying much attention to the many others end up just as dead without any kind of due process is a classic example of focusing on the small to avoid thinking about the large.  And that problem characterizes much of what passes for serious discussion in this country at this time.